I Sustain the Wings
by Doyle-sb4
Summary: She wondered if he was scared to give her the chance to catch her breath. RoseTen


Title: I Sustain the Wings  
Author: Doyle  
Pairing: Ten/Rose  
Rating: G  
Notes: for the Parting of the Ways ficathon for lj userxwingace who wanted Glenn Miller and Jack, no slash, no mature rating. I had to cheat, sorry – Jack's mentioned but isn't actually in this.  
Summary: She wondered if he was scared to give her the chance to catch her breath.

"It's always different," he told her not long after he'd changed, stripping off the leather jacket as he searched for something called a zero room. "Always a bit of a shock. For me as well, I mean. I don't think you ever really get used to dying, no matter how much practice you get." And he turned to her, then, gave her a smile that was broad and anxious and _new_: "We'll be all right, though, won't we?"

Not much she could say to that except "Course we will. We'll be fine, always are." The 'always' caught her out, made her hesitate, because it didn't seem to fit with this man she'd never seen in her life. She tried not to look behind them at the coat, discarded on the floor like a shed skin.

The Doctor nodded as if he understood and said, "Well. We'll see."

He became himself a bit at a time; tried on a suit he found in the wardrobe room and decided he liked it, tried on an accent in Edinburgh and kept it afterwards. He liked cricket and card tricks and heaped sugar into his tea, and the more little changes she spotted the easier it was to accept that he was the Doctor, still. Had to be one of those paradox things that she'd thought were all about not killing your grandfather. She should've guessed, she thought, that the Doctor could be a paradox all by himself.

For a while she dreamed about the Gamestation – about distant singing and a storm, which she told him about, and about a kiss she knew had never happened, which she didn't – and then the dreams came less frequently, and finally stopped. She was almost sorry. But they were busier than ever, as if he'd decided to squeeze in seeing as much of the universe as he could in the quickest time possible, and she didn't have time to worry about dreams.

She wondered if he was scared to give her the chance to catch her breath. Standing on a gravel beach on some distant planet and staring up at the spiral of her galaxy she almost told him not to worry, that she promised to stay; but when she reached for his hand she realized they were apart, the width of another person between them, and she wasn't sure if she was leaving a space for Jack, or for the Doctor himself.

It was about two months since he'd changed, as far as she could work out in the TARDIS's changeable cycles of days and nights, when he finally asked, "Do you want to go home?"

She pretended to be fascinated with the alien script scrolling past on the console. "For a visit, you mean? Yeah, that'd be all right, I need to sort things out with mum."

"For good, Rose."

Do _you want to go home_? He might as well have asked _Am I really that different? Does it change things?_ Yes. No. Don't know. Can I phone a friend?

"For a few days," she said carefully. "But just for a few days, yeah? Can't have you flying away without me."

Her mum pronounced him mental, but she added that the other one had been mental, too, and that at least this one was better looking. Rose had seen that one coming two or three million miles away. The Doctor seemed vaguely bewildered by the whole thing, but didn't go flying away without her. She bought him a book of sudoku to keep him out of trouble, caught up on all the news from her mum and Mickey, and in less than a day she'd decided she was never coming back here for good, no matter how many times the Doctor changed. It wasn't her any more, as if she'd regenerated as well, done it so slowly she'd never even noticed.

She held his hand crossing the estate, and it didn't feel strange. "Take me somewhere nice," she said.

"I'm always taking you to nice places. The court of Louis XIV, you liked that."

"Proper-nice. Nobody-locking-us-up-in-a-dungeon nice." She ran her thumb over the back of his hand, thinking of the old space between them with a sudden ache. "Somewhere Jack would have liked."

"You do know that rules out most nice places?" he said, with a tiny squeeze on her fingers that she knew meant _I miss him too_. "Proper-nice… you go and get changed and I'll have a think about it."

He didn't think about it for long, because by the time she'd found a black dress that should be suitable anywhere that might be classed as 'nice', they'd landed.

"Long Island, New York, 1939," he said. "Glen Island Casino. I think I can nab us a table on the balcony, over the river. The Glenn Miller Orchestra's playing tonight, I think – yes, there they are."

She leaned over the console to look at the small screen. "Which one's Glenn Miller?"

"In front, with the trombone."

"He looks like my old geography teacher."

"Well, nobody knows where he disappeared to. Maybe he ended up in the early twenty-first century, teaching geography in a London comp."

Stranger things had happened. She should know. She'd been attacked by shop window dummies, fought ghosts with Charles Dickens, been nearly killed by a robot Anne Robinson. Helped save the world. Nearly destroyed it.

Watched her best friend turn into someone else entirely.

"Two years from now," she said, "and Jack'll turn up in London with his ambulance ship, and he won't even have met us yet. Like he'll still exist in 1941, no matter what." She watched the man on the screen, wondering what year he had disappeared – would disappear, because it had happened years ago, it was in all the history books, but it hadn't happened yet. "Is that why you travel with people? Because once they've been somewhere they'll always be there, even if they leave you or they…"

"Or they die?" the Doctor finished quietly. "Only they never do, not really, because it's like you said. What gets left behind. Permanent trails, like anchors in time." He was tapping his long fingers on the control panel, so out of time that it made a sort of rhythm with the music. "Your great-grandparents are probably alive now, you know. The family tree that leads to Rose Tyler's already branching, and nobody knows it yet; Jackie and Pete haven't been born, but they will be. It's 1939 and right this moment, over in England, some of the first humans I ever traveled with are children, no idea what they're going to grow up to be."

He grinned, the solemn look that had been creeping over his face vanishing. "And it works both ways, future as well as past. Sometimes I'll go to a place and there'll be people looking at the TARDIS as they go by, hardly even seeing it, and there'll be one person that looks just a wee bit longer than everybody else. And I'll think, is it just 'cause they're bored on the way to work and they want the distraction of wondering why this dirty great blue box is sitting in the middle of Regent Street - or are they remembering some old family fairytale about great-great-granny's misspent youth when she ran away with a man from space?"

"Do you do that often?" she teased, returning the smile. She was glad of the thought of him never being truly alone, suddenly felt very close to the TARDIS' past occupants, the people whose names she didn't even know. "Run off with people's great-great-grandmothers? Because there's a word for people like you."

"I think it's cradle-snatcher." A strand of her hair had worked free of the clasp, dropped over her eye. He pushed it back – made more of a mess than if he'd left it, but she supposed that was him all over. Couldn't leave things alone. "Will we go outside?"

She reached for the lever that opened the doors and the music filtered in from outside. The band, as if they knew she was listening, started into the song she'd danced to during an air-raid, when Jack was just a gorgeous, exciting stranger and not somebody she loved almost – almost – more than anybody else.

"We're all right here for a bit," she said, reaching out. "So do you still have two left feet, or do you think you can dance, now?"

He still couldn't dance, it turned out, to save his life. To save any of them. Some things didn't change that much.

Rose let her head drop against his shoulder, and smiled into the collar of his shirt, and if the music stopped she didn't notice.


End file.
